Lord Campbell of Alloway

Lord Campbell of Alloway, who has died aged 96, began a distinguished legal
career in Colditz, defending British officers facing Wehrmacht courts
martial for attempting to escape or “baiting” their guards.

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Campbell (second from right) With fellow prisoners in front of Colditz's chapel

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A "ballet" performance at Colditz. Campbell is standing fourth from right.

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7:30PM BST 04 Jul 2013

Called to the Bar just before the war, Lt Alan “Black” Campbell was in constant demand as inmates tested their captors to the limit; Peter Tunstall, most persistent of the “goon-baiters”, was court-martialled five times. To Campbell’s relief – and that of the defendants – the Wehrmacht conducted the proceedings in Leipzig punctiliously.

At Tunstall’s third court martial, for disrupting a German inspection by throwing a water-bomb from an upper window, Campbell got him off with a month in solitary. At the fourth, on the more serious charge of jabbing a guard with his finger when refused a bath, he secured an acquittal.

When Campbell was not allowed to appear, he was permitted to engage a civilian lawyer, Dr Naumann, who practised in Colditz village. Inmates’ faith in Naumann – based on his having been a POW in Britain during the First World War and his ability to achieve tolerable sentences – offset their conviction that he was overcharging.

Campbell handled most of the cases involving inmates in British uniform, going over their stories with them meticulously in one of the castle’s dormitories. The most serious, in August 1944, involved 13 Czechs who had enlisted with the RAF and were charged with taking up arms for an enemy. The trial, before German’s highest tribunal, never took place as the war neared its end, but three other RAF Czechs were executed.

He also framed the defence of an American, Col Schaefer, brought to Colditz after obstructing an officer trying to post a notice at another camp, which warned: “Escaping is no longer a game.” After his court martial, Schaefer came back to Colditz under sentence of death; he appealed to Hitler, but it was the Fuehrer who had ordered his execution. Held in solitary confinement, he was saved by the end of the war.

Halfway through his time at Colditz, Campbell and 11 persistent escapers were sent to the supposedly even more secure Oflag IXA at Schloss Spangenberg. On his arrival the senior British officer asked him: “Are you intending to escape?” “Maybe,” Campbell replied. “Please do not,” the SBO told him. “We are comfortable here and do not wish to lose our privileges, our parcels, our walks. That is an order.” “I may disobey it.” responded Campbell. And he did.

Campbell teamed up with Capt Jimmy Yule of the Royal Signals, in the adjoining cell; they took a door off its hinges so their neighbours could get out and play cards with them. But when he and Yule tried to break out, they were captured crossing the castle moat. They were then returned to Colditz.

Campbell the barrister achieved political prominence because of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. He featured in a number of high-profile cases before the Industrial Relations Court, before the unions began ignoring the judgments it handed down.

Created a life peer by Margaret Thatcher in 1981, Campbell spoke with authority in the Lords as her government finally passed reforms that stuck; his contributions were always measured, as when he warned that banning strikes in essential services would only work if arbitration were mandatory.

He was also a leading opponent of the War Crimes Bill, passed only after John Major’s government invoked the Parliament Act to override the Lords’ veto. Murder was murder in any country, he argued, but the jurisdiction to try it was sovereign.

Campbell told the Lords he had been “among the uninvited guests of the Third Reich”. He saw no reason to reopen issues arising from his captivity; in 1984 he urged Lord Kimberley to stop pressing for an inquiry into claims that the Treasury had pocketed deductions from officer POWs’ pay, saying it would be “wholly inappropriate” 35 years after the event for payments to be made except on grounds of hardship.

His most moving contribution came during a 1998 debate on reforming the law on treason. He told the House: “I think the last person who was hanged in the Tower was a stool pigeon at Colditz. That was for treason. I am not going to mention his name. Those of us who were there were delighted to hear the result.”

Alan Robertson Campbell was born on May 24 1917, the son of John Kenneth Campbell, and educated at Aldenham, the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1939, becoming a bencher in 1972.

Commissioned into the Royal Artillery, he joined the British Expeditionary Force. Captured in May 1940 as it fell back on Dunkirk, he proved a thorn in the Germans’ side in a series of camps before arriving in Colditz in June 1941.

After the castle was liberated, Campbell practised on the Western Circuit, taking Silk in 1965. He appeared in high-profile child custody and abuse cases, and represented defendants in an “Angry Brigade” bomb trial and the fraud trial resulting from the collapse of Rolls Razor. But increasingly he specialised in employment and trade union law.

However he was not always pitched against the unions; in 1969 he represented the National Union of Railwaymen against a member whom it had barred from seeking its presidency. Nor was he a union-basher; when Dr David Owen proposed mandatory postal ballots for union elections, Campbell said they should first be given the opportunity to regulate themselves.

When Barbara Castle published In Place of Strife, Campbell argued that giving the government the right to interfere in industrial relations was not the answer; an independent Industrial Court would be better. And when after the 1970 election Heath produced his Bill, Campbell predicted it would strengthen responsible trade unionism.

The temperature began to rise as the Bill made its way through Parliament; Campbell was retained by five members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, disciplined for not joining a protest strike against the legislation.

In June 1972, with the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) in place, he was retained by the owners of a Hackney cold store picketed by dockers for not employing registered dock labour. Campbell asked the Court to sit in secret as the workers feared intimidation; it refused, but granted an order to end the blacking – which was ignored.

Campbell then went to the Chancery Division, seeking a remedy under the pre-existing law, which the dockers had said they would obey. But Mr Justice Megarry said the dockers could not choose which courts to obey, and sent the case back to the NIRC. The picketing went on for eight months, the company eventually dropping its case.

In between criminal cases at Winchester crown court, Campbell appeared regularly before the NIRC. He secured an undertaking from the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers to halt disruption at a factory from which it was trying to oust another union; represented a lighterage firm forced to pay a man to do nothing because trade unionists would not work with him; and attempted to have a May Day strike by the AUEW banned as “political”.

After little more than two years, and now under a Labour government committed to repealing the Act, the NIRC heard its last case on July 25 1974. It was Campbell who paid tribute to the court and its staff on behalf of the Bar.

In 1976 Campbell was appointed a Recorder, a post he held until 1989. He continued to take briefs, appearing for Private Eye when it was accused of libelling Cecil Parkinson, and for the mother of an eight-year-old violent deaf boy sent to a mental hospital where he was the only non-adult. He also chaired, in 1976, a Society of Conservative Lawyers group that advocated incorporating the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law and setting up an Administrative Court to protect the citizen.

Arriving in the Lords, Campbell called for hospital pickets to be prevented from barring medical supplies and advocated “cooling-off periods” before strikes. When in 1983 Eddie Shah’s Warrington printing plant was besieged by pickets from the National Graphical Association, Campbell spoke of “a political dispute launched against Parliament by a handful of trade union officials, with the apparent support of the Opposition and the TUC”.

He was a prominent supporter of Clause 28, passed in 1988 to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality by local councils and in schools. Campbell insisted the clause was designed not to harass homosexuals but to curb attacks on family life. But he did press ministers for assurances that homosexuals were prevented from serving as prison chaplains.

Campbell served on the Lords’ Committee for Privileges (for 18 years) and Ecclesiastical Committee, the Select Committee on Murder and Life Imprisonment and the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

From 1998 to 2004 he was president of the Colditz Association. At various times he was Vice-President of the Association de Juristes Franco-Britanniques, patron of the Inns of Court School of Law Conservatives, and a member of the British Council’s law advisory committee and the management committee of the UK Association for European Law. He was awarded the Emergency Reserve Decoration in 1996.

He wrote several textbooks: Restrictive Trade Practices and Monopolies (with Lord Wilberforce); Restrictive Trading Agreements in the Common Market (1964); Common Market Law (1969-75); The Industrial Relations Act (1971); EC Competition Law (1980); and Trade Unions and the Individual (1980).

Alan Campbell was thrice married: first, in 1947, to Diana Watson-Smyth (they divorced in 1953); secondly, in 1957, to Vivien de Kantzow, who died in 2010; and thirdly, in 2011, to Dorothea Berwick, daughter of Col Edward and Lady Elizabeth Berwick. She survives him with a daughter of his first marriage.